Impressions: Zombie-Filled Yakuza Packs Heat, Cabaret Clubs

Kiryu Kazama and his allies pose for the conclusion to the Yakuza saga.Image courtesy Sega

TOKYO — New juicy details regarding Ryu Ga Gotoku of the End, the zombie-invasion version of Sega’s popular Yakuza series, were released after an extended trailer was screened at the Sega booth on Thursday at the Tokyo Game Show.

The announcement that a zombie invasion would destroy the Kamurocho district, the site of the first four installments of the main Yakuza storyline, had fans thinking that something had gone horribly wrong in this new game, to be released on PlayStation 3 in the spring of 2011.

This panic heightened when a picture of a shotgun-toting Goro Majima, a twisted antagonist who has appeared in every main installment, was released to the public. This was later followed by a picture of Shun Akiyama brandishing dual pistols, the should-have-been-deceased Ryuji Goda with a gatling arm, and then Kiryu Kazama one-arming a sniper rifle.

It looked as if Sega had gone insane and was planning to turn their lucrative franchise into a Resident Evil rip-off — but fear not, there was genius at work. (Or so we hope.)

Like its predecessor Yakuza 4, Of the End will tell its story in four parts, each focused on a different character: Shun Akiyama, Goro Majima, Ryuji Goda and Kiryu Kazama, in that order. At some point, for some mysterious reason, the red-light district of Kamurocho becomes overrun by flesh-eating zombies, and the city slowly becomes walled off by the military.

As the story continues, the sectioning off will continue, and players will have to find new ways to move through the underground and inner walls of the city they once knew. Through utilizing secret passages, characters can venture outside the wall in order to partake in the illicit recreation and entertainment typical of the Yakuza series.

Even inside the walls, however, cabarets will be up and running at all moments — even the most cataclysmic ones — and some cabaret girls will even join the player as gun-toting support characters. Each of the four playable characters will have their own upgradeable weapons, as well as a pool of other weapons like grenades that can be found or built.

Why must they pack so much heat, you ask? Because zombies aren’t the only type of monsters that have been unleashed: In the trailer, I caught a huge rock golem, a faceless demon that resembled Venom from Spider-Man, and some creepy man-bug with legs coming out of his chest.

Battles are set up in the third-person shooter style, and unless the aiming reticules were erased for the trailer, it seems as if the characters automatically take aim as long as they’re facing in the right direction. The series’ “heat” moves have been transformed into “heat sniping,” in which characters can take quick shots at strategic items around their surroundings, such as blowing up dangerous smoke pipes next to the raging undead.

Watching the trailer on that huge screen on the Tokyo Game Show floor, I couldn’t help but feel excited, and yet at the same time the sheer absurdity of it all had me laughing out loud. As a huge fan of the Yakuza series, however, I can admit that its story has never been free of cheese — but to me, it’s always been an endearing kind of cheese.

Sega seems intent on going all-out on this final sequel, and it’s evident that the developers had fun preparing a sequel that absolutely no one could have foreseen. And I respect that. In a Sega Official Book 2010 interview, series director Toshihiro Nagoshi talks about how many games utilize zombies, but do so basically as a means to make possible the virtual slaughtering of human bodies without any sort of mortal backlash. Nagoshi says that Sega has developed Of the End with the intent of making it rise above and beyond all other zombie games. That’s a lot of zombie love.